A week ago today I went down to Sasabe with another filmmaker and with O. He wanted to interview her about the effects on wildlife of the border wall, the subject of his new documentary, and I just tagged along.

Sasabe is a tiny little town bisected by the border, in the middle of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, about 90 minutes southwest of Tucson. The new wall, part of the 370 new miles approved recently and being pushed frantically by Ministry of Fear, err, I mean Department of Homeland Security, is pretty much done at Sasabe, but the joke of it is that you can look off in the distance and see the ends of it a few miles on either side of the port of entry. So migrants and drug runners might have to walk a little bit out of their way if they weren't already avoiding the area by now. So stupid.

In other places the situation is more dire, like around the San Pedro River, a sensitive riparian area that they're planning to put wall right up to the banks of, and a cement road that cuts right through the stream for Border Patrol vehicles to easily cross at.. It's still not going to stop illegal border crossings, but it's going to fuck up a lot of sensitive species there.

Sigh.

In an attempt to earn some extra money and get some more exposure for this video, I uploaded to Current TV my coverage of the Binational Fiesta in Naco.

I uploaded one piece to Current 2 years ago but found their terms of use restrictive at the time - they required that any video you post could not appear anywhere else on the web for 3 months. Now they've removed that rule so I will probably be submitting more work to them.

So if you have an account on their site or don't mind registering, please greenlight this piece. That is, if you like it. :-)

Last night at Solar Culture there was a great event organized by a local group called Tierra y Libertad, which is not only a community youth organizing group but also contains within it a hip hop group of the same name. They mix radical hip hop of a really high musical quality together with radical political organizing that is nevertheless firmly grounded in the latino community here in Tucson. The event last night was a fundraiser and an outreach event for their Stop the Raids campaign, working to educate the community about the ICE deportation raids going on and what immigrants' rights are. They had tons of educational material, books, CDs, videos, and the hip hop group performed as well as a rapper from DF called Akil Ammar who was really great and politically militant as well.

Here's a rough clip I shot with my phone of Tierra y Libertad.

Today is my 7th day in Germany and my 3rd day in Rostock, where the anti-G8 mobilzation is happening all this week.

Things are a lot calmer than the huge crazy protests on Saturday that I missed because I was still in Berlin. There has been constant tension with police, but nothing serious has actually happened, and one has to remember that the mainstream media reports are greatly exaggerated and focused on the violence and the extremes. I'm hoping to counter that in my own coverage, focusing instead on the issues, the real reason we're here.

Yesterday's focus was migration and borders. I spent all day shooting video of 3 dfiferent actions. This post to Indymedia Germany that I posted this morning has a brief description of each and some stills I shot. Then last night I went to a panel discussion on migration. What an exhausting time, and yet inspiring. It has been really good to see, after getting involved via my own proximity to the US-Mexico border, how other struggles over borders and immigration and migration compare and contrast. The commonalities really resonate. One really inspiring thing is the slogan which I used for the title of this blog post. I think this needs to start being used in the US, because it encapsulates the real problem so concisely.

All day so far today I have been editing the footage I shot, sitting here for the last 5 hours at the Indymedia Center in downtown Rostock, next to a window looking out over the harbor and the little yard where activists sit on couches and drink tea. Dozens of other indymedia people from all over the world (well, mostly Europe) come in and out, doing some work, posting some news to their own local IMCs, sending emails.

In a couple of hours is another panel dicussion that is part of the "Alternative Summit," a more moderate, NGO response to the G8 this week - I'm interested in a panel tommorrow though because John Holloway will be there - the author of "Change the World Without Seizing Power," a book whose main ideas I found extrememly inspiring but whose academic tone made it the biggest reading disappointment of 2006 for me. However I still hope he will be interesting to hear speak.

I'm sitting here waiting for my finished video to upload. I'll post again to say where it is. I'm tired of waiting...

During the big immigration march and rally in Los Angeles yesterday the police apparently went apeshit for no reason. (via mi amiga Abi)

We were lucky enough to have well-behaved cops, for once, in Tucson yesterday. They didn't even enter the park all day and they kept the racist vigilantes away across the street.

Great video from The Onion:

Immigration: The Human Cost

I'll probably show this as part of the opener for a screening of Gigante Despierta sunday night at Dry River.

I'm in San Diego for a few days to show my Juarez film. I'm staying with friends whose house is like a major waystation for activists, journalists, and other cool people passing through town. Right now there's a Peruvian who's been staying at the Cucapa camp in the Colorado River "delta" for the last 2 months and travelling with La Otra Campaña before that. He's going back to the camp today with a photojournalist from Brooklyn who just arrived last night to take shots of the last high-tide fishing outing the Cucapa will do for the season. Another photojournalist, from Germany, is here taking photos of the border wall. He just published a book of panoramic photos from The Occupied Territories called simpy "Wall". They are beautiful and of course disturbing.

The Brooklyn photog brought a copy of the latest issue of National Geographic that has a really great piece about the border Wall, with incredible photos from all along the U.S.-Mexico border and text by Charles Bowden. Most of Bowden's text is focused, as an exemplar, on Naco. It's too bad that he apparently wasn't aware, when he wrote it, that the cross-border fiesta was going to be happening again.

The screening of my film had an amazing number of students turnout at San Diego State yesterday. This morning I'm showing it at City College as part of a series of human rights films there sponsored by the local Amnesty International.

The ocean air is wonderful here in San Diego.

As I mentioned as an upcoming event a couple weeks ago on this blog, a cross-border party happened in the tiny border town of Naco (Arizona and Sonora).
Here's the short video I made about the event:

You can also download the video here.

I'm excited about going to this event in a week and a half:

I plan to take a camera and document it. I like that it's been going on for years and that it's a smaller (and perhaps less "radical") but very real version of my vision of what the No Borders Camp in November could be like.